Cow In A Field; 147 Break

When I was a kid I wrote a song about how I wanted to be a cow in a field, not giving a damn about yesterday's ideals. I got thinking about it during this year's Snooker World Championship, in which old man Steve Davis had a really good run. But why shouldn't he? Why aren't older players capable of outdoing the youngsters? I think it was John Parrot who said that when you're an older player and you go down for a risky shot you are carrying the burden of the memories of every time you've missed such a shot in the past. The ever-increasing burden of remembering being the downfall of a man, perhaps even a whole culture... It made me think of Nietzsche...

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, neither melancholy nor bored. … A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say: 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say'- but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering.

…Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore never be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down or bends him sideways, in encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden... (Nietzsche, section 1, On the uses and disadvantages of history for life)